Well I expect (theoretically) Noah took the correct water into the Ark with him to keep the fish alive. The fish outside may well have died.

The whole point of the flood was to kill everything--that's why Noah had to take all of the paired animals on board. They were going to have to repopulate the world of their species. I imagine that it was some sort of Godly smiting water, since some things probably could have survived somehow. It's the Bible...we don't expect it to make sense all the time.

The majority of the earth, at the time, was salt water. But, most RAIN is fresh water. So, there were both kinds of water. Noah was well prepared, so I imagine that he took plenty of fresh water on the ark for his family and the animals. As far as the fish, the Bible says EVERY living thing on the earth died. The only things that were spared was whatever was on the ark with Noah.

I won't claim that this answer is absolute fact, but here goes. We often think we know it all, based on what we see through our little windows on the world. We assume that all fresh water fish and salt water fish can't co-exist or live in each other's environment. We think a lot of things that prove later to be false. Have you noticed that ships don't fall off the edge of the earth and that flies don't spring spontaneously from rotten meat? The Flood account doesn't give us all the details we would like. Some might say that that makes it implausible; others assert that we should just accept it blindly. As usual, the truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle. It is quite reasonable that Noah didn't take every kind of fish and sea mammal aboard the ark. Let's just think about taking a blue whale pair along for the ride. In reading Genesis 1, we learn that Earth (Hebrew 'ahm) can mean the dry land, as opposed to Sea. So, to say that every creature on earth perished, we can accept that sea creatures could be exempt. It also speaks of souls (Hebrew 'nephesh'), or breathers as dying. The Bible doesn't apply this term to plants. Like animals, many are more resilient than we once believed and my survive, either as grown plants or as seeds, for long periods under very harsh conditions. Really, we don't need every scientific detail, nor do we need to be ignorantly gullible to trust a straightforward, simple account of how our ancestors survived a great cataclysm 4 millenia ago. I believe that as science catches up with the Bible, more of these mysteries will unfold to us.

If that is the only flaw you see . . . Actually, Sealife can survive in fresh water. Two examples: 1) Bull Shark can and does swim up rivers for extended periods. 2) Lake Nicaragua contains numerous species of salt water life that (through evolution) developed the ability to adapt to fresh water.

Obviously, the Ark is just like Dr. Who's time machine, the TARDIS; much bigger inside than outside. I've even read that the ark was actually a space ship, and the "earth" that was destroyed is the planet we now call Mars.

It seems to me that if it rained that long you would have ended up with, basically, salty fresh water, that may have been within tolerances of both types of fish. I know that if you make the change over a period of a few days you can convert salt water fish to fresh water and vice versa. There also probably would have been pockets of water that were saltier than others (where the oceans were) where sea creatures could have survived.

psst... I'll let you in on a secret... It's a STORY - to teach a lesson... not a scientific account of a factual occurrance. It is most-likely related to the flooding that occurred when the isthmus at modern-day Istanbul gave way and flooded the Black Sea area... All the ancient cultures in the area developed a traditional story of a "world-wide flood" after that event... Naturally - the world, as they new it, did flood... Look up the National Geographic web page. There's lots of info there.

The story can fit, the entire body of water wouldn't have to be ONLY fresh or ONLY salt. There are places on earth now where it's party fresh and partly salt water when the two bodies of water will mix. Why couldn't half the earth be salt and half the earth be fresh in those times too?

The following link has a full article about this subject: http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/AnswersBook/fish14.asp Several points can be made here, from what we know and can observe of fish today: 1. Many fish today are able to survive large changes in salinity, or move between fresh and saltwater; 2. Much specialization within each type of fish has occurred since the Flood. Among fish groups today, some members of that type are saltwater, and others *in the same grouping* are freshwater fish. As just a few examples: -- The Atlantic sturgeon is a migratory salt/freshwater species but the Siberian sturgeon (a different species of the same kind) lives only in freshwater. -- the families of toadfish, garpike, bowfin, sturgeon, herring/anchovy, salmon/trout/pike, catfish, clingfish, stickleback, scorpionfish, and flatfish all include both fresh and saltwater species. In fact, most of the families alive today have both fresh and saltwater representatives. Clearly this is not a problem for a global flood, and shows that the ancestors of modern-day fish had the ability to tolerate large changes in the salinity of water. Due to natural processes, i.e., natural selection within the available gene pool, some fish today have lost that ability. (Note: natural selection within the gene pool, or speciation, is also a well-observed process, as in the classic case of the black and white moths of England during the Industrial Revolution. The moths contained within their genetic makeup the possibility for both colors. The particular environment they were in resulted in a type of natural selection -- in a clean environment the dark moths were seen more easily and eaten up; when the environment turned dark with pollution, the white moths were seen more easily and eaten up. Yet this is not true "evolution" in the macro evolution sense, just different genetic possibilities within that type of moth.)